Everything You Need
by missbip0lar
Summary: After a brief yet intense relationship with Uzumaki Naruto, Neji attempts to put himself back together, and stumbles upon love in the process.


A/N: I would apologize, but I'm not really all that sorry, to be honest. I know you guys have been waiting for _months_ for the second installment of this little "series" or whatever, and for making you wait without a word, I really am sorry. I have been a tad preoccupied with another fandom, as I am sure you can see from my stories list. This preoccupation with Supernatural (Dean and Castiel, specifically) has allowed me to fine-tune my craft a little better, and I feel like this sequel with surpass its predecessor. I hope it will, anyway; if it doesn't, this author's note will just make me look like an ass. Anyway! Here we are, moving on to Everything You Need, the sequel to Everything You Want. **Special Note for new readers: If you haven't read Everything You Want, don't fear! This prologue will get you up to speed. **Returning readers, prepare yourself for lots of angst and a healthy dose of man-tears.

Disclaimer: Characters belong to Kishimoto-sensei, I just enjoy playing with them sometimes. Mistakes are my own (unbeta'd).

Prologue: Some Nights (Intro)

_There are some nights I hold on to every note I ever wrote_

_Some nights, I say "fuck it all" and stare at the calendar_

_Waiting for catastrophes, imagine when they scare me_

_Into changing into whatever it is I am changing into..._

_And you have every right to be scared._

I didn't mean to fall in love with him. Hell, I didn't even really _want _to fall in love with him. He was loud and obnoxious and _completely not my type. _But Naruto had this... this undeniable magnetism that just drew me right in, very much against my were doomed from the start and I knew it; Naruto was in love with someone else, he always had been, and he still is. But I fell in love with the asshole anyway. Hell, maybe I'm a masochist. It would explain a lot, actually.

I met Naruto through his best friend (who used to be my boss, and is now Naruto's boyfriend, life partner, wife - whatever you want to call it). Sasuke and I used to go out for beers after work sometimes, when one or both of us was having a particularly shitty day at the office - or even at home, like it usually was for him. Sasuke has always been, by nature, an arrogant and self-assured jackass, and his best friend-slash-roommate had a tendency to really grind Sasuke's gears when it came to certain things. Apparently Naruto was a bit of an attention-seeker, and now that Sasuke had gotten a new... uh, _bedfellow_, I guess, Naruto had been reduced to a pouting, irritable menace. In the beginning, I figured his issue was Sasuke ignoring him in favor of a new fling - something I was sure would last a grand total of two weeks, considering Sasuke's previous track record with guys.

So I offered to take Naruto out, help Sasuke by getting his best friend out of his hair for a few hours and - who knows - maybe even take him back to my place so Sasuke could have an opportunity to have the apartment to himself for a night. Initially, Sasuke had laughed at me, insisting that I had "no idea what I was getting myself into" and that I would be "begging Sasuke to take him off my hands after the first hour." After a bit of convincing on my part, though, Sasuke promised he would try to talk Naruto into a night out.

As it turned out, planning a blind date was easier than Sasuke or I had expected. Naruto was hesitant at first, from what Sasuke said, claiming that blind dates weren't "his thing." Finally, though, Naruto agreed to a date. So, a week after my first bringing up the possibility, I was to meet the man who would turn my world completely upside-down.

We met that first night at Hokage, his father's restaurant (the hottest one in town, in fact). To this day, I'm not sure what I'd been expecting upon meeting my boss' best friend; Sasuke had always described him as "loud and clinically stupid." I didn't see him that way. When I walked in, Naruto was the very first person i saw. He was running a hand through untamed blond spikes and tugging uncomfortably at a blue tie situated around his neck. For a split second, as he looked up, it seemed as though we were both stunned speechless. I was busy taking in the blue of his eyes that put the bluest sky, the bluest ocean, to absolute shame. I had a feeling he was taking in the length of my hair at the time, and considering how much he grew to love it over the next few months, I would be willing to guess my assumption had been dead on.

The date was slightly awkward in the beginning as Naruto stumbled anxiously over his words, asking the necessary date questions about my job and my family. It was all prefunctory and stilted, so I brought up a topic of conversation I figured he would latch on to quickly: Sasuke. It took me literally no time at all to ascertain that Naruto was harboring _some _sort of feelings for his best friend. It was while Naruto was telling a story about Sasuke kissing him in high school to keep a girl at bay (ironically enough, said girl happened to be my cousin Hinata) that I finally figured out the extent of Naruto's feelings.

"That's the day you fell in love with him, isn't it?" I'd asked, completely innocent in my attempts to get to know him. But already I was feeling a traitorous twinge of jealousy and possessiveness in my gut that I somehow knew wouldn't be squashed easily. So instead of beating around the bush, so to speak, I told Naruto my intentions: I planned on getting him naked and sweaty and _in me_ as soon as possible. He seemed to take it as a challenge.

"I don't put out on the first date," he'd told me with a cryptic grin.

The alcohol and honesty did wonders for the previous awkwardness, and even when I met Naruto's dad - clearly the source of his son's good looks as well as his sense of humor - the date went by pretty smoothly.

Our blind date ended that night with a scorching kiss, Naruto pushed against the driver's side door of my car and just _moaning _like he hadn't been laid in years.

From there, things progressed... quickly, to say the least.

Two nights after our first date found Naruto and I completely naked in his bed, with Sasuke and his... Gaara... in the next room. Our first time was slow and sensual, with whispered promises of devotion punctating harsh breaths and creaky bedsprings.

Declarations of love were made barely a week later in a concert hall, over the sounds of Dir en Grey and my own shouts and moans as Naruto lifted me against a wall and stripped me of my pants and made a complete mess of me. We had what must have been thousands of witnesses.

Sasuke quit talking to me. I suspected he was going through his own personal crisis, realizing he'd been in love with his best friend and all, but that was hardly my problem. Especially consodering that Naruto seemed to be rapidly forgetting about the love he felt for his friend in favor of fucking me ten ways to Sunday every single night. Admittedly, I was growing over-confident in my abilities to keep Naruto to myself, and it would prove to be my downfall.

It was inevitable, I suppose, when Sasuke stepped things up after realizing that his best friend had been harboring feelings for him since high school. I'm still not completely sure what happened between them, but it started with an arguement and ended with Naruto showing up at my door with his head down, his tail between his legs, an overnight bag slung over a broad shoulder, and a thousand apologies. I forgave him, of course, because love makes you stupid, but I was already formulating a plan to get Sasuke out of my way (safely and legally, of course) so I could have Naruto all to myself.

The plan - the stupid, stupid, stupid plan that would ruin everything and save me all at the same time - was set into motion the very next day. Sasuke was miraculously still seeing the short, quiet redhead, and Gaara and I often commiserated about how our significant others were bound to leave us for one another eventually. So it was to him that I pitched my idea. All I asked was that he keep Sasuke close for as long as humanly possible, and in return, after all was said and done and Naruto and Sasuke decided they'd rather have each other than the two of us, Gaara and I would hook up. "Once," I'd said at the time. "We can only do this once."

Plan in place, I began to feel more comfortable, knowing I would have some more time to possibly-maybe-perhaps woo Naruto enough to make him give up on Sasuke forever. It was a fool's errand, and deep down I knew it. But at the time, I was willing to anything. I probably would have considered selling my soul at that point, honestly.

Eventually, the spring turned to summer, and Naruto and I decided to take a few days off work for a vacation. My family owned a vacation home in the country, and Naruto and I drove for hours and hours with the convertible top down, singing along to terrible pop songs on the radio. We were in love, there was no doubt about it. Naruto and I barely left the bedroom at all in the five days we stayed. We made love over and over and over again until we could barely move, opened up to one another emotionally, and just... we fell so deeply for each other. I was _so sure_ that Naruto was mine for good now, that Sasuke would no longer have the power over him that he once did.

I was wrong.

Two weeks after our little vacation was Sasuke's birthday. That was when everything fell spectacularly to shit. I wasn't at the cookout that the Uchihas planned, so I can't say with any certainty exactly what happened, but from what Gaara told me, Naruto and Sasuke were being sickeningly sweet to each other all day long, staring at each other and acting like a couple. So when Sasuke dropped an infuriated Gaara off at his house after the party, the redhead had let him have it; he shouted (very uncharacteristic of Gaara) at Sasuke, told him about my deal with him, dumped him, and slammed the door in his face.

My relationship with Naruto was over, but I didn't find out from Naruto. Or even Gaara, who had technically betrayed me by clueing Sasuke in on our agreement. I found out from Sasuke, on Naruto's phone, listening to _my boyfriend _make the same desperate little noises for Sasuke that he'd been making for me for months. Sasuke mocked me, telling me that he was going to be "keeping Naruto occupied for the rest of the night."

So that night I got stupidly drunk and passed out in my bathtub fully clothed with a bottle of hard liquor clutched in my hand. The formal breakup happened the next night, after work, in the same restaurant where our relationship started. Afterwards, I made my way to whatever nameless bar was on my way home and proceeded to drink myself numb and let a stranger whose name and face I cannot recall fuck me into a dingy motel mattress and then leave after he finished. It felt like a neverending cycle; work, drink, stalk Naruto online, find a guy with blond hair and blue eyes to fuck, sleep, repeat.

Naruto and Sasuke ended up buying a house not long after my entire world fell apart. And somehow, I ended up parked out front of their new home, drunk, begging Naruto to take me back. Not my proudest moment, admittedly. I received a broken nose for my troubles, and wound up sleeping it off in Hinata's bed while she rubbed my back and pressed a cool washcloth against my forehead.

"He's not worth it," she'd murmured quietly, in her sweet Hinata way. "I learned that a long time ago, Neji. And now it's your turn. You need to gorge yourself on ice cream and bubble baths and sappy romance movies. You need to stop drinking so much and come work at Father's company with me. You have two weeks to get yourself cleaned up and presentable," she told me, gentle but firm, and I nodded. "I love you, Neji nii-san. Don't let this beat you. The first broken heart is always the worst."

She was right, of course. Naruto may have been my first love, my first broken heart, but that didn't last forever. That's why Naruto is my prologue, and not the entire book.

The real story starts in August, two weeks after the breakup, in - you guessed it - a bar.

**TBC**


End file.
